Kiss and Kill. Richard Deming
Her eyes grew wider and wider as I tossed my coat onto a chair, tossed my tie after it and began to strip off my shirt.
A knock came at the door. I had completely forgotten ordering ice and soda from room service.
CHAPTER IV
THE NEXT MORNING, I bought a nearly-new Mercury sedan, and we headed east. Two days later we hit St. Louis.
Our headlong flight halfway across the country was the unnecessary sort of blunder I never made in later years. Back then, the minute a deal was closed, I felt impelled to run. But there really had been no reason for haste in leaving Los Angeles. Mrs. Hollingsworth hadn’t the slightest suspicion that she’d been taken. I could have stayed around for several more days, then announced that my vacation was over and I had to return to New York. Assuring the old woman that I’d keep her posted on developments probably would have postponed any suspicion on her part for weeks.
As it was, my sudden departure without even saying good-by must have aroused her suspicion at once. The wire service report of our bunco dodge reached St. Louis about the same time we did. It only got brief, inside-page coverage that far from Los Angeles, but it gave our descriptions and said we were wanted for fraud.
We were far enough away now to be reasonably safe, though. The police don’t seem to hunt down bunco artists as relentlessly as they do more violent criminals, such as bank robbers. While it wouldn’t be wise to return to California for some time, we didn’t have to fear that every St. Louis policeman we saw would have our descriptions memorized and was on the lookout for us.
We checked into the Chase Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Doud of Chicago and started to spend our money.
Mavis had the time of her life. It was the first time she had ever had all the shopping money she wanted. I turned her loose in the stores with instructions to outfit herself from head to toe.
The result was miraculous. Except for her liking for flashy jewelry, Mavis had excellent taste when she had the money to indulge it. In her new clothes she actually looked like an heiress.
I wouldn’t let her buy any jewelry, not trusting her taste in that area. But I bought her some myself. I got her a plain, smart-looking wristwatch and a half-carat diamond ring to replace the chip she wore. I also got her a couple of expensive pins and a few sets of earrings. When I gave it all to her, she examined it dubiously.
“It’s all very nice,” she said. “But isn’t it kind of plain?”
“That’s the idea,” I told her. “I want you to look like a lady, not a barroom pickup. From here on out you’re never to wear any jewelry I don’t personally select. Understand?”
“All right, Sam,” she said reluctantly.
For a whole month we did nothing but play. Mavis made a delightful playmate. She was full of life, eager for new experiences, and as enthusiastic as a child at a circus whenever I took her anywhere. I took her to baseball games, fights, auto races, to Forest Park Highlands, and even to the zoo. We hit every show and every night club in town. We sampled every recreational facility St. Louis had to offer.
And we spent a lot of time simply making love. It was like being on a honeymoon.
Although I controlled the spending of money, had our local bank account in my name and wrote all checks, I took advantage of Mavis’s bookkeeping experience by making her the family accountant. Near the end of June she balanced up my checkbook and announced, “You know we’ve gone through over five thousand dollars in only a month, Sam?”
“I’m not surprised,” I said. “How do we stand?”
“About five thousand left. Didn’t you have anything when we met?”
“About what you did,” I said. “Under two hundred. I hadn’t made a score for some time.”
Actually Cora Hollingsworth was the first big score I’d ever managed to pull off. My stake before meeting Mavis had never climbed over a couple of thousand. But I didn’t tell her that.
Mavis was frowning down at the paper containing her computations. “At this rate we’ll be broke in another month, Sam. Shouldn’t we start economizing?”
“I like to live high,” I told her. “It’s time to go back to work.”
We started that same evening. I brought out my potential sucker list and went over it.
My sucker list had been compiled over a number of years from numerous sources. From newspaper reports of top income-tax payers, from inheritance reports, from Who’s Who, from magazine articles on prominent people, from the society pages of major city newspapers and from the bunco-game grapevine, which stretches from coast-to-coast and keeps members of the fraternity informed as to what marks have recently been taken, and how, and constantly adds new prospects to the list. For every large city in the country I had a list of at least a dozen possibles.
From my St. Louis list I picked a couple of rich widows, a widower and a prominent society matron who was noted as a patroness of struggling young artists.
“Four possibles,” I said. “Well start weeding them out tomorrow.”
“How?” Mavis asked.
“The newspaper morgues. We compile all the background material we can on all four. Then pick the one we figure has the kindest heart.”
“Are we going to try the same stunt we pulled in Los Angeles?”
“If any of the possibles have a weakness for sad stories. If not, we’ll dream up some angle to take advantage of whatever weaknesses they have. If none have any that seem promising, we’ll move on to some other city.”
The next morning I visited the Post Dispatch and Mavis went to the Globe Democrat. The story that we were magazine writers doing research for some personality pieces got us into both morgues without difficulty. At noon we met to compare notes.
We settled on one of the widows, a Mrs. Sarah Brewster. She gave heavily to charity and did a lot of personal welfare work, such as delivering baskets to the poor at Christmastime. She sounded like a carbon copy of Mrs. Cora Hollingsworth.
Mrs. Brewster was a permanent resident at the Jefferson Hotel. I moved in there, leaving Mavis at the Chase, and within a week had her lined up for the kill with the same dodge we had used in California. Three days later we blew town with eight thousand dollars of Mrs. Brewster’s money.
Mrs. Brewster had been just as nice an old lady as Cora Hollingsworth. But if Mavis suffered any conscience pangs this time, she managed to suppress them. The only emotion she exhibited was glee at the ease with which we had extracted the money.
During the next six months we pulled the same pitch twice again, once in Pittsburgh and once in Seattle. We had a close call in Seattle. As I came out of the bank after cashing the mark’s check, I bought a morning paper. On its front page was a warning against the racket we had just pulled, along with a resume of our scores in Beverly Hills, St. Louis and Pittsburgh.
I didn’t wait to get out of town before converting the cashier’s check into cash. I cashed it at a bank three blocks from the first, picked up Mavis and we took off fast. Apparently our mark didn’t read the morning paper, for we squeaked through without running into any road blocks.
We stopped in Salt Lake City long enough to sell the car, and flew from there to Houston, Texas.
We decided to lay low in Houston for a while. We now had a fifteen-thousand-dollar stake and, even with our taste for high living, could afford a lengthy vacation.
We spent Christmas at the Shamrock Hotel. Christmas Eve, possibly under the influence of the season, I asked Mavis to marry me.
We were in the Shamrock’s cocktail lounge having an after-dinner drink when I asked her. She paused with her drink half raised and slowly set it down again. Her green eyes were bright when she looked at me, but there was an odd, waiting expression on her face. She didn’t